There is a transpontine theatre, situated laterally towards the Waterloo Road, and having a northern front towards an anomalous thoroughfare that runs from Lambeth to Blackfriars, for which I have had, during a long period of years, a great esteem and admiration. This is the Royal Victoria Theatre. To the neophyte in London I frequently point out a brick erection, above the cornice of the pediment, and say, “My friend, in the days when the ‘Vic.’ (it is popularly termed the ‘Vic.’) was known as the ‘Coburg,’ that brick slip was built to contain at its rise—for it could not be rolled up—the famous ‘Crystal curtain,’ which ruined one management to construct, and half ruined another to demolish. The grand melodramas the Coburg used to give us—real horses, real armour, real blood, almost real water!” Those were the days of “Ginevra the Impaled One” and “Manfroni the One-handed Monk.” There are famous dramatists, actors, scene-painters, who would look rather shame-faced (though I cannot see why they should be ashamed) were they reminded, now, of their achievements in the service of transpontine melodrama at the Coburg. How stupidly absurd people are in repudiating their beginnings! Buffel, the millionaire contractor, denies stoutly that he ever carried a hod, although hundreds of us remember him on the ladder. Linning, the fashionable tailor, would poison any one who told him he once kept a beer-shop in Lambeth Walk, and afterwards failed as a tea-dealer in Shoreditch. One of the most accomplished comedians of the day makes a point of cutting me dead, because I can recollect the time, and knew him, when he used to colour prints for a livelihood; and I daresay that Baron Rothschild—with all the philosophy his unbounded wealth should properly give him—would not ask me to dinner, if I reminded him that his grandfather was a pedlar in the Juden-Grasse, at Frankfort. The next Tamworth baronet, I suppose, will strike the beehive and “_Industriâ_” out of the family escutcheon, and assume the three leeches sable on a field gules _semée_ or, of his ancestors the De la Pills, who came over with the Conqueror as barber-chirurgeons to the ducal body. And yet a certain Emperor and King was not ashamed to talk of the period when he was a “lieutenant in the Regiment of Lafère;” and the present writer, who is, on one side (the wrong), of the _sangre azul_ of Spain, is not above confessing the existence of a tradition in his family, hinting that his maternal grandmother danced on the tight rope.